What makes Longmont so happy?

Really happy, according to a Feb. 15 report from the University of Vermont Complex Systems Center.

The report found that of 373 cities in the country, Longmont ranks as the second happiest, behind only Napa, Calif.

The team analyzed 10 million geotagged tweets gathered from 373 urban areas in 2011.

Researchers calculated the happiness score of each Twitter message, based on the frequency that happy or sad words were used. They relied on a word list that Amazon's Mechanical Turk users rated based on their happiness. For example, the word "rainbow" was among the happiest on the list, while "earthquake" had one of saddest scores.

Also in the top 15 happiest cites are Lafayette (No. 9), Boulder (No. 12) and Fort Collins (No. 13).

The report found that Hawaiians are the happiest state, often using "beach" and "hi." Residents of the saddest state, Louisiana, were more likely to use profanity. Colorado ranked as the sixth happiest state.

While the methodology does not take into account the context in which words were used, researchers note that with large amounts of data, their technique provides reliable results. Still, it's a small sample size. The researchers analyzed only about 10 percent of geotagged tweets from 2011, and about 15 percent of online adults regularly use Twitter.

To get answers from another set of folks, we hit the streets to ask, "What makes Longmont so happy?"

We chose people who all share something that helps them measure happiness: their jobs, which put them in constant contact with people.

Share us your thoughts on what makes Longmont so happy by tweeting to us @TimesCall.

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